Lawrence Hill, author of The book of Negroes has been awarded the 2012 Freedom to Read Prize. Last summer, Hill was the target of a Dutch activist, offended by the use of the word “negro” in the title of the novel. It was Hill’s “reasoned and eloquent response to the threat to burn his novel The Book of Negroes,” according to a statement from The Writers’ Union of Canada chair Greg Hollingshead, that secured this honour for Hill.

This annual Prize coincides with Freedom to Read Week – which kicks off this Sunday. John Ralston Saul, last year’s prize winner, will receive his award at a ceremony on February 28th.

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HELP!

Two self-described bookish people with an unusual dream have worked over the past twenty fiver years and amassed a 30,000-volume collection on “the land and people’s connection to the land” that could make any naturalist drool. It’s called the Rocky Mountain Land Library, and experts say it’s a Colorado treasure. But the books are about to be homeless.

Soft-spoken Tattered Cover Book Store employees Jeffrey Lee and his wife, Ann Martin, who met on the job, bought all of those books and stored them in every nook and cranny of the rooms of their rented home on Humboldt Street. After nearly 23 years, they must move because the house is being sold.

I wonder if they could afford this awesome house? Of course, that would involve a move to Oak Park, Illinois…but how cool would it be to live in Hemingway’s childhood home? Pretty cool, I’d say!

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Whodunnit First?

Poisoning, hypnotists, kidnappers and a series of crimes “in their nature and execution too horrible to contemplate”: The Notting Hill Mystery by Charles Felix, believed to be the first detective novel ever published, is back in print for the first time in a century-and-a-half.

Although Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone, published in 1868, and Emile Gaboriau’s first Monsieur Lecoq novel L’Affaire Lerouge, released in 1866, have both been proposed as the first fictional outings for detectives, the British Library believes The Notting Hill Mystery “can truly claim to be the first modern detective novel”.

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What’s In a Name?

Patricia O’Brien had five novels to her name when her agent, Esther Newberg, set out last year to shop her sixth one, a work of historical fiction called “The Dressmaker”. A cascade of painful rejections began. Ms. O’Brien’s longtime editor at Simon & Schuster passed on it, saying that her previous novel, “Harriet and Isabella,” hadn’t sold well enough. One by one, 12 more publishing houses saw the novel. They all said no. Just when Ms. O’Brien began to fear that “The Dressmaker” would be relegated to a bottom desk drawer like so many rejected novels, Ms. Newberg came up with a different proposal: Try to sell it under a pen name.

Written by Kate Alcott, the pseudonym Ms. O’Brien dreamed up, it sold in three days.

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Big Top on the Big Screen

Moira Buffini has been signed to adapt Erin Morgenstern’s wonderful novel, The Night Circus for the big screen. Buffini has enjoyed recent success for her adaptation of Jane Eyre. It was really a stunning film so this should be a magical partnership!

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Winter is Coming, Toronto

Calling all Game of Thrones lovers: HBO Canada is partnering with TIFF Lightbox, for Game of Thrones: The Exhibition.

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Literary Mixtapes

I love this idea! It’s been around for a while now, but I haven’t gotten off my duff to actually create any mixtapes for my own favourite books. Harriet the Spy might be just what I needed to get going on this project.

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Poem of the Day

In honour of the day of John Keats’ death (d.1821), I share with you: When I Have Fears that I May Cease to Be

When I have fears that I may cease to be
Before my pen has glean’d my teeming brain,
Before high piled books, in charact’ry,
Hold like rich garners the full-ripen’d grain;
When I behold, upon the night’s starr’d face,
Huge cloudy symbols of a high romance,
And think that I may never live to trace
Their shadows, with the magic hand of chance;
And when I feel, fair creature of an hour!
That I shall never look upon thee more,
Never have relish in the faery power
Of unreflecting love!—then on the shore
Of the wide world I stand alone, and think
Till Love and Fame to nothingness do sink.

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When I have Fears that I may Cease to Be is an Elizabethan sonnet. The 14-line poem is written in iambic pentameter and consists of three quatrains and a couplet. Keats wrote the poem in 1818. It was published (posthumously) in 1848.

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Word of the Day

desinence \DES-uh-nuhns\ , noun:

1. A termination or ending, as the final line of a verse.
2. Grammar. A termination, ending, or suffix of a word.

Quotes

The extreme facility with which the language lends itself to rhyming desinence has a most injurious effect upon versification. There are not verses only, but whole poems, in which each line terminates with the same desinence.
— Wentworth Webster, Basque Legends

But it will end, a desinence will come, or the breath fail better still, I’ll be silence, I’ll know I’m silence, no, in the silence you can’t know, I’ll never know anything.
— Samuel Beckett, “Texts for Nothing,” The Complete Short Prose

Origin

Like descent, desinence is related to the Latin word dēsinere which meant “to put down or leave.”